1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to a telecommunications service provision support system, which supports a plurality of different types of services provided in the form of service-specific data processing during a service session.
2. Description of Related Art
It has been known for service providers to provide different types of services via a retailer party to customers, thereby simplifying the access to services at least from the customers point of view.
The price charged to a customer is determined by parameters and pricing schemes set by the service provider. The service provider generates a notification of the price to be charged for the provision of a particular type of service, which may be actually charged by the service retailer. Service providers therefore implement pricing logic within their services.
The paper “Operational Support Systems For The Future”, D Freestone and M Owen, BT Technology Journal, Vol. 14, No. 3, July 1996, describes an operational support system (OSS) which provides pricing and billing functions along with other functions such as provisioning, portfolio management and customer help. The paper proposes an approach for delivering flexible, inter-operable business services, and standardised application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow information services from multiple service providers to be packaged together via common interfaces. Notably, the pricing functionality described include the information services generated streams of chargeable “events”. “Events” in this case are only generated by the information services provider if they are considered chargeable, and the choice of such chargeable events is made at the time of construction of the service. The pricing options exemplified include a subscription-type pricing policy, which is known to be a one-off chargeable event. A further policy type is a policy of pricing by content, which requires the number of units of the content to be known from the event parameters. A further policy type exemplified is pricing by duration, which requires the start time and end time to be known from the event parameters.
In this regard, chargeable events, other than subscription-type events, have in the past been generated not as a record of an instantaneous event, but as what as may be referred to as a “combined” event, generated when instantaneous events are logically combined. For example, in conventional telephony, a chargeable event is recorded in a call record, which specifies the duration of the call by means of both a start time and an end time. In this sense, the chargeable event recorded in the call record is a “combined” event, consisting of data specifying more than one instantaneous event.